Nearly half a century has occurred since Sandra Eleta, an art history graduate, walked the streets of Portobelo on Panama’s Caribbean coast. Interested in photography, she studied the work of great masters like Eugene Smith, but she didn’t feel that she had a vision of her own. After Smith had done a series on midwife Maude Callen in South Carolina for Life magazine, it occurred to Sandra that a Portobelo midwife and healer named Josefa San Guillén might be able to help her find her vision. “Josefa, I don’t have the eye for it, I don’t have a vision of my own. Help me give birth to an ‘eye,’” Sandra said. She requested to accompany Josefa to births and to take photographs. Although the midwife was surprised, she agreed. Once Sandra was back in the lab, she developed the photos and nothing. She didn’t have any sort of eye or vision she had hoped for.
Sandra had already put away her camera, along with her dreams of being a photographer when her father gave her a Hasselblad camera he had won in a bet on a boxing match. He had been assured that it had traveled to the moon and back. After her letdown with photography, Sandra wanted to learn the mysteries of healing from Josefa, so she accompanied the healer as she tried to cure the evil eye.
“You brought me this camera when I no longer need it,” Sandra told her father.
But Josefa pestered her to believe in herself and told Sandra to use her new camera. She did, and her very first photo birthed a vision of her own, her ‘eye.’ “I discovered that, until that moment, my photos had been clichés, but everything happens in its own time.” In the end, Josefa did help her give birth to her eye, as promised.
Sandra came to Portobelo at the beginning of an era of reconnection, rediscovery, and reaffirmation of the Afro-descendant legacy in Panama and Latin America in general. “When I arrived in Portobelo, there was no awareness of Africa, not even among the Portobelo residents themselves. But a more reasonable awareness began to emerge after the arrival of Professor Arturo Lindsay and his students from Spelman College,” remembers Sandra.
This environment and the support of poet John Ryan inspired the Portobelo Workshop, a women’s co-op initiative.
“The Portobelo Group, of which Ryan was also a member, brought together filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who sought to learn more about their Afro-descendant origins,” she continues. “Portobelo culture has many roots, including some completely unknown to the inhabitants. The language of the Congo (descendants of runaway slaves), for example, had not been linked to other Afro-descendant ‘trends,’ if we can put it that way, but it is now considered decisive in determining the degree of people’s affinity with African ancestors.”
Sandra’s eye improved and grew stronger as it was nourished by the events of her life. Life in Portobelo became the first of her photographic series, but other circumstances had an equal impact for different reasons. For example, part of “Servants” was done when she lived in Spain during the Franco era. “The heroine here is Purita. I heard the anxious click of her heels along the hallways and felt her energy, which contrasted with the complacency of the older servants.” Sandra’s “Servants” is an attempt to study how those people understand their role. While the oldest servants, like Víctor, did not separate who they were from what they did, the younger ones like Purita were more conscious of the distinction between their own selves/identities and their work.
“The nervous click of Purita’s footsteps made me see her as a caged bird, which is why I photographed her against a background of swords, like a mounted butterfly.”
That was the last time Sandra saw Purita. The young woman was an undercover ETA terrorist who died during an attack on a Spanish prison.
The eye matures and becomes more consistently perceptive of the differences among photographic subjects. Sandra’s most recent series, “Paths of the Skin,” demonstrates this. “In this series, I wanted to say that everyone’s skin is a medium of expression, whether the subjects are hippies, Emberás, or Congos,” she explains. Other significant series include “Women Peasants,” “Touched by the Saints,”“Emberá: Children of the River,” and “Grandparents.” “All my photos draw on my life experiences. My experiences impelled me to take the photographs and they constitute the very soul of the photos. Photography would be impossible without these invisible contexts.”
Writer: Lauren White
Editor: Zayna Dilawar
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